The low cost of data storage hardware has led to the collection of large volumes of data. Merchants, for example, generate and collect large volumes of data during the course of their business. To compete effectively, it is necessary for a merchant to be able to identify and use information hidden in the collected data. The task of identifying this hidden information has proved very difficult for merchants.
In the case a promotional campaign on an existing customer database, it is often very difficult for a merchant to estimate the effectiveness of the promotional campaign. In many cases, the merchant needs to run several complicated queries on a customer database and so requires vast technical knowledge to formulate the appropriate queries.
Similarly, understanding the changes ill behaviour of different customer demographics can be a difficult task, and without such understanding an effective promotional campaign cannot be systematically formulated.